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Under the hood of a Panasas 3100

28 December 2008 661 views 4 Comments

I recently picked up a gently used, off-lease Panasas ActiveStor 3100 Parallel Storage Cluster from eBay.  The unit powers on and I have been able to console in to the management and storage blades.   The next step is to bring the cluster online and learn more about the activeScale operating environment (which appears FreeBSD based..) and the PanFS parallel file system.  Documentation online is scarce without an active support contract with Panasas. Look here for updates as they happen.

4 Comments »

  • Casey said:

    Hi Neal,
    Did you ever get the Panasas up and running?
    Regards,
    Casey DuBois
    xxxx-xxx-xxxx Direct

    # 8 December 2011 at 3:25 pm
  • Neal (author) said:

    Hi Casey,

    I did get the chance to tinker with it a little bit before it got put in storage for the move. Anything in particular you were looking for?

    - Neal

    # 12 December 2011 at 9:07 pm
  • Casey said:

    Hi Neal,
    Thanks for the reply.
    My company has received quantities of Panasas arrays in the past and I’ve always held out hope that they could be re purposed with some flavor of Linux. I was just hoping that you had made some progress that I could use on the next batch we get.
    Regards,
    Casey

    # 13 December 2011 at 9:29 am
  • Neal (author) said:

    Hi Casey,

    From what I recall, the OS is FreeBSD based.. console access is via the serial port on the front of each device… they have two IDE connections but generally only room enough for one 3.5 inch drive? There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to boot up via a CD so the only options I could think of were to boot over the network or swap out the drives with say a IDE to CF adapter or IDE to USB and go that route. Once the proper drivers / devices are determined for disk and network it gets a little easier with a recent linux kernel.

    Once you are able to boot into a basic enough shell with the right drivers you can pull down and install anything you want that works with the hardware.. I never got far enough to learn any more about the back-plane or how to monitor / interact with anything else..

    If you have any further information on the hardware (who manufactures the blades and chassis) that would be helpful.

    Regards,
    Neal

    # 13 December 2011 at 9:55 am

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